WASTED visits to fly-tipping sites where nothing is there are costing Basildon Council £90,000 a year.

A report put to council members claimed roughly half of staff journeys each year are a "waste of time", with no rubbish being found despite reports of fly tipping being made.

Paul Brace, the council's director of community and environment, said at a meeting last night (Wednesday, 15 March) said the council does not have an electronic system logging incidents, meaning multiple reports of the same fly-tip have been resulting in multiple visits.

He said: "50 per cent of all journeys regarding fly-tipping that our staff go to are a waste of time, because there's nothing there and that is efficiency that we could make through technology."

He continued to say the council is working on a system to log reports and action taken which could be accessed by councillors and members of the public, as part of the digital strategy.

He also said special collections have been mistakenly reported as fly-tips.

Mr Brace said: "We are managing a 20th century service with a 1970s infrastructure."

Cllr Davida Ademuyiwa said: "That's a lot of money, especially if we are trying to reduce costs." She later said: "This shouldn't even be such a big problem to solve. £90,000 would have solved it ten times over."

Of 5,469 reports made to the council this financial year, nothing was found in 2,560 of them. In 2021/22, 7,440 reports were made, but nothing was found in 3,781 of them. The report only shows partial information for 2022/23.

The figures show a general downward trend in the number of reports and the number of items removed, with a drop in incidents of 16.4 per cent from 2020/21-2021/22. It claims this corresponds with increased enforcement and education.

50 per cent of fly-tips are in council land, with 35 per cent in highways and 13 per cent in alleyways.

82 per cent are made up of household waste, while 9 per cent are commercial waste and 4 per cent are white goods, such as tumble dryers, washing machines or fridges.

The average size of a fly-tip in Basildon is typically a small van load, the report says.

Last month council leader Cllr Andrew Baggott spoke to the BBC about the scale of the problem of fly-tipping in the region.